This week was pretty exciting! Many of us SIF’s had the opportunity to attend and present our work at the ribbon cutting ceremony! Andrew, Dr. Glover and I had the pleasure of showing off our Agisoft 3D modeling to President Becker–who seemed quite intrigued and impressed no less on the 4K screen. Thanks to everyone involved for a great start to our inevitable success at large-scale collaboration with this space!

I’d now like to continue discussing my ideas on civic engagement by introducing the concept of gamification. Next week I will go into some more depth and definitive applications!

Digitizing vast troves of information can be exciting and productive, but even this hypothetical method of exploring information can be taken yet another step forward towards a uniquely praxis approach by exploring ways of making the civic engagement with this data truly self-sustainable. I believe this can be achieved by integrating the database with social media, (which I will discuss at a later date), and aspects of gamification theory.

Huotari & Hamari (2012) define gamification as: “A process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support user’s overall value creation.” They then add that their definition explicitly highlights gamification as a goal—an attempt at creating gamified experiences—rather than simply being based on using game elements (Huotari & Hamari 2012: 3). The importance of this distinction is that no distinct set of defined game elements reliably produce a game experience—the end goal of producing a game in the first place. They then define the success of a gameful experience based on the voluntary engagement of the player carried out by having intrinsic motivation (Huotari & Hamari 2012: 3). Hamari revises the definition of gamification with this previous study in mind to present it within a useful context for the Phoenix collection: “A process of enhancing services with (motivational) affordances in order to invoke gameful experiences and further behavioral outcomes” (Hamari et al 2014: 1).

Applying gamification to the Phoenix database questions or generated data is essential to sustaining the community. What incentives exist for the stakeholders to continuously interact with the data? When stakeholders are given meta-ownership over their findings through authorship of the questions and community answers to questions beyond what the database presents—a merit system that can be further refined and quantified through symbolic awards of interaction is in place to promote active engagement in an online community (See Table 1).

 

Table 1: Examples of Gamification

Source:  Huotari & Humari 2012: 4.

An incentive-based system of interaction can also further the interaction between academia and the public by offering quantifiable incentives to academics through system generated interaction ratings or statistics that can easily be attached to a curricular vitae to show public interaction and outreach. These ratings are achieved by overseeing discussions and quantifying the frequency at which public questions are answered and the publicly voted ratings of their interaction. This forces a degree of accountability and responsible interaction with the public that includes them within discussion frameworks, rather than excludes them and benefits both parties involved equally. In essence—the academic is paying for quantifiable scholarly capital by interacting with interested communities on the communities’ own terms.

 

Hamari, Juho, Jonna Koivisto and Harri Sarsa

2014 Does Gamification Work? — A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification. In Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, USA.

 

Huotari, Kai and Juho Hamari

2012 Defining Gamification – A Service Marketing Perspective. In Proceedings of the MindTrek Conference, Tampere, Finland.

Hey Guys and Gals!

This has been a very productive week at CURVE for me–mainly through discussions, meetings, and presentations. The idea that struck a chord with me: discussing future ideas of blending 3D virtual environments with literary and historical narratives. Brennan, a SIF director, inspired me to really start brainstorming the potential of this kind of project. His idea was to reconstruct a block of Georgia State’s campus from a past time period–to see what it looked like before our campus was built–the people and lives. My idea is to use a game engine, Unity3D, to first create this past city block–and then work with other SIFs with different backgrounds to help build an interactive experience, building upon ideas of gamification to make the educational aspect truly engaging–not idle like a museum.

Museums, although interesting, suffer the same problems that any ‘public’ space has; these spaces promote ‘public involvement’ rather than public engagement. The public is allowed to be involved–but not directly engaged with the process. So the questions are: How can we take a reconstructed environment–much like a display at a museum–and make it engaging? Are people simply allowed to interact with the virtual environment or can they manipulate it? How can they manipulate it? Can the user offer their own narrative experience outside the one provided? How can this environment pull the user into it–make one feel a part of the surroundings–rather than outside of them?

I think the answer isn’t a simple one–but I think achievable through hard work and collaboration. I’m going to be thinking about these questions more in the coming weeks as I start to build a platform within the engine to tinker with. Next week I’d like to post on gamification, what that term means, and how it can be applied to this specific project. If you’ve played Farmville, Candy Crush, or World of Warcraft–you already know without knowing. It’s a fascinating sub-field of Game Theory used by advertising campaigns and just about everything attempting to make money at this point–but we’ll start getting into that next week. I will split it into two separate posts–a small series and follow up with my ideas on Civic Engagement versus Public Involvement and how gamification can potentially take Civic Engagement to levels not previously possible before the Digital Age.

Cheers,

Robert

Dear All,

This is my first post as a member of the CURVE project–and I’d love to introduce a little about myself and my goals while working at such an awesome space. For anyone who doesn’t know me–my name is Robert Bryant. I’m currently an M.A. student in the Anthropology department, studying archaeology with a focus on software/hardware methodology within a praxis framework. That sounds really official sounding, so to make it sound more exciting–I’m heavily interested in freely sharing archaeological and historical information over through the democratic access of the internet.  I think everyone should have equal access to our shared cultural heritages and getting all data online, accessible, and more importantly engaging, fosters an extremely community forward interpretation of the past. How can this be accomplished?

The term ‘public’ has positive connotations but can easily fall short on civic engagement–or “Working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.”

So, how can open public access to these collections be extended directly to its communities and stakeholders without endangering artifacts and carefully organized datasets?

The answer lies in current technological innovation. With the advent of high-speed internet data transfer rates,  data digitalization technologies(such as the recently acquired NextEngine scanner at CURVE), and the wide-spread availability of computing devices capable of processing these large datasets—like smart phones, tablets and traditional computers—previous sets of analog data can be converted into digital formats that synergize with the open-access of the internet, integrating new concepts of gamification with existing social media formats to create a diverse, sustainable, digital community that will benefit both GSU and the community it serves.

Some quick statistics on why this innovation is both relevant and possible:

• As of 2012, 80 percent of all US households own some form of a computing device and 75 percent of US households have home internet access (US Census Data 2014).

• As of 2013, 890 million active Facebook Accounts

• As of 2014, Imgur has 1.5 million image uploads a day — Imgur serves more images in 10 minutes than there are in the entire Library of Congress

Bearing these numbers in mind, it seems highly relevant to digitize an entire database of archaeological and historical information for open, public access in context with community archaeology in a framework of praxis-based civic engagement.

So–who is this chimerical community? Whose needs are being addressed?

Everyone’s. Although this project has enthusiast groups in mind, like GAAS(who regularly volunteer with the collection) and other local stakeholders–it also addresses the need for academics and professionals to not only interact with the communities they are a part of–but openly collaborate with them–A challenge the Phoenix project may be able to help address in terms of how public engagement can be rewarded through a quantifiable merit system that can easily transfer to a curricular vitae.

How do we actually implement this?

One very important step is the 3D scanner currently held by the CURVE lab: it ensures a degree of digital transfer not previously possible for collections—the ability to freely distribute 3D data, which enables freely available 3D visualization software, such as Blender, web browser plug-ins, and current and future 3D printing technologies access to potentially the entire collection’s materials for independent or institutional research. There’s no need to worry about controlled access to public collections once they’re digitized and distributed freely through an online user interface–the Smithsonian is already doing this.

But—simply making the data open-access and arbitrarily available is not good enough. It is the difference between Public Involvement and Civic Engagement. Making the data accessible is not actively engaging with the Phoenix Project’s relevant stakeholders—it is allowing them to be involved. The more relevant question is: How can the database actively engage the communities it represents self-sustainably? I believe the Heurist system, in development by Ian Johnson, Jeffrey Glover, and myself, has the capability to achieve this.

It‘s a PHP-based online data management system that allows for both the customization of the data import interface and the front-end user interface for interacting and querying that data. The latter is incredibly important, because different communities and individuals interact with technology differently.

So, how can this user-interface be designed to accommodate these differences?

Does an individual interact with data visually(photographs and images),

geospatially(google maps), statistically(query searches), or through qualitative questions(What did people drink in Decatur in the 1930s)?

In order for the database to truly be open-access—it must take into account how various stakeholders access information and those engagements must also be publicly accessible and easily linked to social media. For instance—if I find interesting data in the MARTA collection—my results would be stored publicly and anyone can discuss or comment on that data with a linked social-media account. As a non-administrator, I’m even invited to question the data itself and offer alternative opinions to the typologies of artifacts and documents.

So to conclude–This might work well for the public and enthusiasts—but how do we get academic and professional researchers involved?

An incentive-based system of interaction—or gamification—can further the engagement between academia and the public by offering quantifiable markers to academics through system generated interaction ratings or statistics that can easily be attached to a CV or Resume to show public outreach.

These ratings are achieved by overseeing discussions and quantifying the frequency at which public questions are answered and the publicly voted ratings of their interaction. This forces a degree of accountability and responsible interaction with the public that includes them within discussions, rather than excludes them and benefits both parties involved equally. In essence—the academic or professional is paying for quantifiable scholarly capital by interacting with interested communities on the communities’ own terms.

That’s it in a nut shell–I can’t wait to keep everyone up to-date with the various technologies and ideas I tinker with/develop that bolster this access–like a 3D interactive environment. If anyone has ideas or wants to help–you can find me at CURVE!

-Robert